That's a new feature introduced in Python 3.5. If you have to support Python 3.4, you're basically stuck with the update loop.

People have their own favored variations on how to combine multiple dicts into one, but the only one that's really a major improvement over the update loop is 3.5+ exclusive, so it doesn't help with this. (For reference, the new dict-merging syntax is {**kwargs1, **kwargs2, **kwargs3}.)